Doing

René Magritte

Belgian

1898, Lessines, Belgium1967, Schaerbeek, Belgium

René Magritte

Biography

Although widely associated with surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, René Magritte pursued a different goal, that of a heightened awareness of reality.

A graduate of the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Magritte spent the bulk of his career in Belgium. His impassive, realistic style intensified the effect of his quietly strange renderings of familiar objects and situations. These often involve manipulations of scale (a giant comb; a tiny bed) or the confusion of opposites: interior and exterior, night and day, the human self and the inanimate object.

Magritte was particularly interested in the conventional, deeply engrained equation of material things with pictorial or linguistic representations. His works prompt us to resist our habitual response and to recognize the painted images before us as precisely that — images, and not the things they depict.

Works in the Collection

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